'Circuit' Judges U.K. Justice

Watch a clip from the film "Closed Circuit." A high-profile terrorism case unexpectedly binds together two ex-lovers on the defense team - testing the limits of their loyalties and placing their lives in jeopardy. (Photo/Video: Focus Features)

By

John Anderson

Aug. 29, 2013 3:59 p.m. ET

An enormously watchable thriller about terrorism, personal ethics and governmental malfeasance, "Closed Circuit" is also a movie with a very British politesse: At no time will anyone fear that the fate of the world is actually at stake. It's a romance, after all, albeit one with a serious political agenda.

John Crowley, who directed "Boy A," actor Andrew Garfield's breakout movie and one of the more touching films of 2007, eschews what would ordinarily be cinematic virtues—a decided point of view, for example, or a consistency of time—in favor of entertainment. But even though its pacing is erratic, "Closed Circuit" is also fairly propulsive, enabling Mr. Crowley to keep his audience's eyes engaged, with a very attractive cast to help him do it.

The film begins with a blunt assault on its viewer's central nervous system: We see London's popular and well-populated Borough Market via as many as eight closed-circuit monitors, which subdivide the screen and provoke considerable tension. Something's going to happen. Where am I supposed to look? If you're concentrating on the lady with the shopping bag, you'll miss the exploding truck, which kills scores, injures more and presents British higher-ups with a potential political catastrophe: It may have been their fault.

Arrested immediately and with little explanation is Farroukh Erdogan ( Denis Moschitto), a Turkish national who had spent time in Germany and who, despite a drug bust, was allowed into Britain. Why? Such is the key to the story. It's probably fortunate that Mr. Moschitto is a German of Italian descent, because Farroukh is an almost comically clichéd example of the movie terrorist, sallow, shifty and, just incidentally, a heroin addict, whose own son (the solid young Hasancan Cifci) turns against him. Making Farroukh more sympathetic, however, would have trivialized the film's message, which is that changes to Western criminal justice since 9/11—the ease, for example, in which information becomes classified, and questioning of policy is deemed treasonous—have not only rendered those systems unjust, but ripe for abuse by the state. As the voice of ruthless bureaucratic pragmatism, Jim Broadbent, as the British attorney general, is pretty close to perfect.

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Eric Bana in 'Closed Circuit'
Focus Features

Our rodent-like terrorist has troubles, certainly, but he also has what may be the best-looking defense team in the history of English jurisprudence: Claudia Simmons-Howe ( Rebecca Hall), who will be his special advocate, and Martin Rose ( Eric Bana) who is asked to step in as barrister after the apparent suicide of his client's previous counsel. Readers will be asking at this point, "Who is Farroukh's solicitor?" That would be Devlin (a beautifully rumpled Ciarán Hinds) who, like many of the principals in "Closed Circuit," does his best to illuminate the vagaries of the British trial system, and criminal law in general. The film's usually first-rate screenwriter, Steven Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things," "Eastern Promises") pulls a few fast ones, such as having an angry Martin facetiously reciting to nettlesome reporter Joanna Reece ( Julia Stiles) the facts of the case, which amounts to plain old exposition in disguise. It doesn't help that the dialogue is graceless.

The framework of the story is not so complicated, although a spoiler alert seems prudent: Farroukh was being mismanaged, as it were, by the British secret service, MI5: He went rogue, aided the cell behind the bombing and used government money to do it. No one in the upper levels of government wants that information made public, and by threatening to expose it, Claudia and Martin put their lives in jeopardy.

The premise of "Closed Circuit" is a rather cavalier indictment of the U.K.'s clandestine services, but one apparently inspired by the current realities of prosecuting terrorists. As Farroukh's defense barrister, Martin will operate in open court. As special advocate, Claudia will argue behind closed doors and once she's heard the classified information that supports the government's case against her client, she'll be forbidden from communicating it to Martin, or even speaking to him—which presents no great problem at first, since both are nursing bruises from their nastily concluded affair, which has left Martin with an unquenched adoration of his co-counsel. No one will blame him—or her, for circumventing the law.

"Closed Circuit" is a film in which the cynicism is far more convincing than any of its faint stabs at optimism, which resides almost entirely in the sure-to-be-resuscitated romance between Claudia and Martin. Their nobility is as assured as the fatalism of the film's core story, but Mr. Bana and Ms. Hall, two actors who emanate both intelligence and heat, are a balm to the soul.

'Getaway'

A week that began with one ex-Disney Channel star twerking her way to infamy ends with another, Selena Gomez, trying to hot-wire her movie career with "Getaway," director Courtney Solomon's video game disguised as a major motion picture. Neither decision seems very wise. And by the way, why is everyone in "Getaway" in Bulgaria? Because filmmaking there is cheap, and apparently so are automobiles, which expire by the dozens during the movie's 90 minutes of racing through the streets of Sofia.

Watch a clip from the film "Getaway." Former race-car driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) is pitted against the clock when his wife is kidnapped by a mysterious villain. Also starring Selena Gomez and Jon Voight. (Photo/Video: Warner Bros)

Ms. Gomez, late of Disney's "Wizards of Waverly Place" and now a music star as well, is a peculiarly dyspeptic co-star to Ethan Hawke, who plays Brent Magna, a failed race-car driver who comes home one day to find his Christmas tree trashed and his wife abducted. In order to get her back alive, he has to steal a customized car from a parking garage—a locale that provides not only an introductory chase scene but a showcase for Brent's prowess behind the wheel—and then follow to the letter the instructions he receives through the auto's computerized dashboard. It's "Speed," obviously, crossed with "The Fast and the Furious," with just a hint of early Milos Forman.

For many, many minutes there is no sense of why the wife, Leanne ( Rebecca Budig), was kidnapped, or what scheming lay behind the mysterious voice with the generic Eastern European accent ( Jon Voight). But after several hair-raising pursuits by the Sofia police, Brent finds himself at the business end of an enormous automatic pistol wielded by Ms. Gomez's character, called The Kid, who wants his car. Which is actually her car.

It's probably not what the filmmaker planned, but in her hoodie, and wielding that cannon, Ms. Gomez looks like a delinquent chipmunk. It's all you can do not to laugh. Oh, go ahead. But be forewarned that there are many miles to go before we get to the end and it will feel like an eternity before any of it makes sense.

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Selena Gomez and Ethan Hawke in 'Getaway'
Warner Bros. Pictures

None of us really knows how we would act if a spouse were abducted by gangsters in a former Eastern Bloc country where the authorities can't even set up an effective dragnet. But you sense it wouldn't match the picture we get from Mr. Hawke, who can't quite maintain the level of panic necessary to convince us his wife is really being held hostage. He does have a nicely ravaged look these days, although it plays oddly with Ms. Gomez, whose facial contours are remarkably evocative of those of a petulant infant. Mr. Hawke, by contrast, seems positively electrifying.

'Afternoon Delight'

This is clearly the summer of the reality-based woman. First we got Greta Gerwig in "Frances Ha" and then Lake Bell and the brightly comic "In a World…" and now comes Kathryn Hahn, already a comedy cult figure, proving herself to be a dramatic actress of remarkable depth. Maybe she can't save Jill Soloway's "Afternoon Delight," either from its nonsensical title or contrived narrative, but her efforts to reconcile the warring factions inside her character's head is a thing to behold.

Watch a clip from the film "Afternoon Delight." Frustrated stay-at-home mom Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) wants to spice up her marriage and meets a stripper (Juno Temple) whom she adopts as a live-in nanny. Also starring Josh Radnor. (Photo/Video: Film Arcade)

The narrative of "Afternoon Delight" (yes, it shares its title with the 1976 Top-40 hit by the unlamented Starland Vocal Band) is less a storyline than a laundry line on which its director has hung a load of high-end female problems. Rachel (Ms. Hahn) is in a stagnant marriage to Jeff ( Josh Radnor, of television's "How I Met Your Mother"), who has invented an app that allows his wife and child to live in the lap of luxury. While Jeff spends every waking hour at his computer, Rachel is bored out of her skull to the point that she and girlfriend Stephanie ( Jessica St. Clair) require extreme entertainment—in pursuit of which their husbands take them to a strip club where, pushing matters a step too far, each buys his wife a lap dance.

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Kathryn Hahn in 'Afternoon Delight.'
Film Arcade

At this point, uncertainty is director Soloway's friend. Rachel's enigmatic fascination with McKenna ( Juno Temple), the stripper with whom she has an intimate if not pornographic encounter, hasn't yet had a chance to evolve. So the viewer is in a state of suspended awe: Has Rachel suddenly discovered her true sexuality? Is that what's at the root of her sexless marriage? Can she be so clueless as to think she can take a self-described "full-service sex worker" home like a kitten, without her own comfortable world coming apart?

Apparently. But until things don't quite work, they work quite well, with Ms. Temple operating at pitch-perfect tone as the movie's guileless, waifish hooker and Ms. Hahn journeying through Rachel's metamorphosis with just the right amount of longing, confusion and her own adroit comic sense.

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'Our Idiot Brother' (2011)

Director Jesse Peretz surrounded his star, Paul Rudd, with an exemplary team of comedy sidekicks, including Zooey Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks, Steve Coogan, Emily Mortimer, Adam Scott and Kathryn Hahn, who is delightfully loathsome as the self-righteous hippie girlfriend of Ned, Rudd's holy fool and lovable truth-teller. Released from jail after a guileless pot sale to a police officer, Ned returns home only to be evicted by Janet (who won't even give him his dog back), moves into his mother's house, complicates his sisters' already screwy lives and provides a satisfying degree of blissed-out comedy.

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'The Town' (2010)

Directed by Ben Affleck, this kinetic caper-thriller commits misdemeanor after misdemeanor, but is elevated out of its Southie Boston torpor by two key performances— Jeremy Renner, whose felonious James Coughlin is the wingnut buddy of robbery mastermind Doug MacRay (Mr. Affleck); and Rebecca Hall, whose Claire Keesey is a woman for whom many men would cheerfully rob a bank. The weak link in the cast is Mr. Affleck himself, but the film he made just before "Argo" is exciting, propulsive, rich in Bostonian atmosphere, and Ms. Hall is a wonder.

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'Boy A' (2007)

Andrew ("The Amazing Spider-Man") Garfield was just another slender, good-looking British import when he starred in this delicately constructed drama from "Closed Circuit" director John Crowley. Inspired by England's 1993 James Bulger case, in which two 10-year-olds abducted and murdered a 2-year-old boy, it is based on the novel by Jonathan Trigell, who speculated what might have happened to one of the perpetrators after a lengthy incarceration. The screenplay is by Mark O'Rowe, and Mr. Garfield shows sensitivity and craft in bringing the character on the page, Jack Burridge, to tormented life.

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